by Anton Rippon
EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF MISS C. M. EDWARDS, LINCOLNSHIRE, JANUARY 1942
One of the worst shortages – well, for a woman at least – was elastic. Particularly knicker elastic. Imagine that you were walking down the street and suddenly you realized that your knickers were falling down! You had a couple of options: you could bend down and take them from around your ankles and put them in your handbag, which was humiliating; or you could step out of them and walk on as though nothing had happened. But then you would lose a perfectly good pair of knickers. Actually, there was a third option – if you had enough warning. When you felt them going, you might be able to grab them from outside your dress, and then do a funny walk until you found somewhere private where you could sort them out. That happened to me once when a boy was taking me to the pictures. I managed to get into the ladies’ toilet, but I think he’d already spotted that something was wrong from the way I was walking, all bandy-legged all of a sudden. Still, it was wartime. We had to carry on.
Edith Smith, London
In May 1941, the Daily Express reported that, determined to overcome the shortage of eggs, two resourceful climbers descended the 400-feet cliffs at Bempton on the Yorkshire coast and collected 350 seabird eggs that they said they hoped to sell for 2-3 shillings (10-15p) a dozen. The newspaper did not say whether their venture was successful, or indeed legal.
The authorities came down very hard on petrol rationing. I remember that there was a court case where a man from Derby was fined for wasting petrol because he was caught driving to watch Derby County. But another chap got round this by taking his mates to the football in a furniture van. They all crowded inside around a piano. His plan was that, if the police stopped him, he would say that his journey was essential because he was delivering the piano to the NAAFI. He never was stopped and drove that piano back and forth, from his house to the football ground, for about two years.
Bernard Buckler, Derby
It was a funny thing travelling in the war because you weren’t allowed petrol and couldn’t have coaches. We had a chap on the committee whose job involved moving furniture about. He brought this wagon one day when we were playing at Chester. There were no seats or anything. We all got in with our bags and were dropped in an isolated part of Chester and then walked in as though we’d come on the train.
Harold Bell, Tranmere Rovers player
Sport, in particular football, played a vital role in maintaining the nation’s morale, and although the official competitions were suspended upon the outbreak of war, regional leagues were soon organized using ‘guest players’, mostly pre-war footballers now in the armed forces and allowed to play for clubs near to where they were stationed. This ‘make-do-and-mend’ football produced some bizarre incidents.
You never knew which team was which because blokes were coming home on leave and then couldn’t get [to the match] . . . I’ve been at Goodison and it’s come over the tannoy: ‘Any footballers in the crowd?’ Some fans used to go to the game with their boots, just in case . . .
Harold Atkinson, Tranmere Rovers
I lost count of the number of clubs I played for during the war. Many clubs used so many guests that they were hardly recognizable. Once I played for six different league clubs in little more than a week. After I was posted to a camp at Skegness, for instance, I played for Lincoln City and Grimsby Town, switching between the two quite regularly. I can’t imagine how the fans felt. Some weeks there were so many changes that it was hardly worth printing the team sheets. But it was a game of football.
Peter Doherty, Poulton-le-Fylde
I was working at an electrical factory and playing amateur football when the war started. In 1940–41, at the age of seventeen, I found myself in Leicester City’s first team, playing inside right to a little right winger called Billy Wright, whose own club, Wolverhampton Wanderers, had closed down for that season. I had no idea that my right-wing partner would one day win a record number of England caps from the half-back line. A lot of the Leicester players had joined up and that gave opportunities to youngsters like me. I made my debut in May 1940, against Wolves, and managed to score twice, but my best memory was playing against Stanley Matthews in a snowstorm at Stoke. It was beyond my wildest dreams to play against someone like him and I had the war to thank for it. I was just a baby really. The biggest problem was getting time off to play.
Jack Smith, Leicester
Make-do-and-mend football certainly threw up some strange incidents. On Christmas Day 1941, Bristol City set off in three cars to play Southampton at The Dell. By kick-off time, only the car carrying the kit and two players had arrived. The match eventually kicked off one hour late, with the Bristol team completed by five Southampton reserves, the Saints’ trainer, and three spectators. Twenty minutes into the game, the missing Bristol players arrived, crammed into one car. The other vehicle had broken down en route. At half-time, Southampton were winning 3–0 and one of the spectators in the Bristol team decided that he could not carry on. City decided to slip on one of the late arrivals, Ernie Brinton, who changed into the dirty kit and rubbed mud on his knees before trotting out for the second half. Within seconds of the restart, a linesman spotted the ringer and Brinton had to leave the field. In the circumstances it was surprising that Southampton won by only 5–2.
Sometimes the manager himself had to turn out to make up the numbers. On 20 January 1940, Swindon Town found themselves with only ten men at the Aero Engines Company Ground at Kingswood for their match against Bristol City. Swindon’s manager, Neil Harris, forty-three years old, his previous competitive match over nine years earlier, was forced to turn out in borrowed boots too small for him. Swindon lost 5–2 and Harris lost two toenails.
A young man turned up at Chelsea claiming to be a well-known Motherwell player. The manager, Billy Birrell, had only ten men and even though the stranger looked an unlikely footballer, Birrell had little option but to play him. After only a few minutes, Birrell’s worst fears were confirmed. The crowd were also quick to spot that the new man had hardly played the game. All Birrell could do was leave him on the pitch and tell the rest of the Chelsea team not to pass the ball to him.
Northampton Town’s use of guest players – in 1941–2 alone, two-thirds of their players came from the ranks of other clubs – produced an interesting character. In January 1944, they gave a chance to a young man called Hess, of all names, who claimed to have played for one of Austria’s leading clubs before the war. He turned out on the right wing in a 3–0 defeat at Walsall. He was quite awful but Northampton were stuck with him for the whole ninety minutes. Then they said their farewells and Herr Hess disappeared from Northampton Town’s history even quicker than he had entered it.
In October 1943, the Charlton manager, Jimmy Seed, had to apologise to supporters: ‘I feel that it is somewhat necessary for me to attempt some sort of apology for introducing the outside right, Rogers, in our last home game. This player was introduced to the club as the old Arsenal/Newcastle United/Chester player. Being short of players we were forced to play this man with unfortunate consequences. I have now found out that we were hoodwinked, although his inept display was sure evidence of his inability to play. We will leave it at that.’
Southend United goalkeeper Ted Hankey sneaked away from his Royal Artillery unit to play under an assumed name for the reserves against Reading and lost his sergeant’s stripes when his deception was discovered. Liverpool’s Billy Liddell had better luck. Posted to an RAF camp at Heaton, near Manchester, he discovered that personnel were not allowed out until 4.30 p.m. on Saturdays. Liverpool were playing Manchester City at Maine Road and when Liddell’s application to be released at midday was refused, he climbed over the wall and joined up with his teammates at the railway station. Military police were checking passes outside the station but they ignored the party of footballers and Liddell, who later became a JP, got away with it.
A WOMAN’S WAR
The Second World War, just like the First, for ever changed the lot of women
. Prior to 1939, housewifery, shop work or being ‘a domestic’ were about the only tasks that women were expected to perform. But with the bulk of Britain’s manpower serving in the military after 1939, eventually women were also required to do some form of National Service, if not in the services themselves then certainly in the Land Army or in munitions factories. Then it was my mother’s turn to panic. She had not worked since her late teens and when, in the spring of 1942, two men ‘from the Ministry’ turned up on our doorstep attempting to register her for factory work, I can imagine her shock. Eventually, she wriggled out of it by agreeing instead to provide billets for servicemen.
She was in the minority. By the middle of 1943, almost ninety per cent of single women in Britain, and eighty per cent of married women, were working in factories, on the land or in the armed forces.
Factory work could lead to romance in the unlikeliest way. Margaret Naisbett wrote her name on a shell she was packing at the Aycliffe Ordnance Works, County Durham. Gunner Arthur Shepperson loaded the twenty-five-pounder into his artillery piece and later wrote to Margaret to tell her that it had landed among Italian troops. Margaret wrote back to Arthur. In July 1945, they were married at St John’s Church, Darlington.
Women were first called up for war work from March 1941, and at first that meant single women only, between the ages of twenty and thirty. Their roles were wide-ranging, from driving ambulances and fire engines, making munitions and even building ships, to nursing and working on farms. A few delivered aircraft, and a tiny handful worked with the Resistance behind enemy lines, none of which tasks I could ever imagine my mother performing. Factory work would have been too dirty, agricultural labour too demanding. And she gossiped too much to make a good spy. No, she was far better suited to the role of landlady to a few members of His Majesty’s forces.
Around 80,000 served in the Women’s Land Army, which was formed in June 1939. It was not an easy life. The girls looked after animals, ploughed fields, dug up potatoes, harvested cereal crops, killed rats, and generally ploughed the fields and scattered seeds for fifty hours a week.
Some 640,000 of my mother’s contemporaries even joined the armed forces, although of course they did not have to. They served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).
The ATS was formed in September 1938, initially as a voluntary organization that had its roots in the First World War’s Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. At first the roles were much the same – cooks and clerks, waitresses and telephonists – but later they included the manning (perhaps not the correct word here) of anti-aircraft guns and operating radar. They were banned from serving on the front line but, when the British army evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940, women telephonists were among the last to leave. Even our present queen did her bit, training as an ATS lorry driver.
Over 700 members of the ATS were killed during the Second World War, and the WRNS lost over 300 personnel, so despite being banned from the battlefield, women could still pay the ultimate price. Reformed in 1939, the Women’s Royal Naval Service initially restricted its personnel to clerical and domestic work, but eventually they also worked on small vessels in harbours (but not in open water) as well as performing similar tasks to their ATS counterparts such as radar plotters, meteorologists, bomb-range markers, cipher officers, and flying unarmed aircraft.
Sometimes, things could get confusing, though. An ATS sergeant glared when she saw one of her unit, Winnie Jenkins, strolling through the middle of Slough, wearing civilian clothing and whistling merrily away. The sergeant resolved to put Jenkins on a ‘fizzer’ for being out of uniform. But a few minutes later, she saw Corporal Jenkins emerge from a shop, smartly dressed and accompanied by her twin sister, who worked in a local factory. To prevent further confusion, Winnie soon found herself posted to another town.
The Women’s Auxiliary Air Service was formed in June 1939, its original function clearly stated: to provide drivers, clerical workers, cooks, waitresses and people to take messages. Like the ATS and the WRNS, its roles were soon extended, in their cases to include working on barrage balloon sites and reconnaissance photograph interpretation. Indeed, many ‘WAAFs’ found themselves very much in the front line, stationed as they were at RAF aerodromes under the thick of the Battle of Britain. Some 900 members of the WAAF died during the Second World War.
Women have always been particularly good at keeping calm and carrying on, but their patience must have been sorely tested between 1939 and 1945, when they were required to take on unfamiliar roles that were normally filled by men who only ended up resenting them for it. In factories and in the armed services, women found many men hostile to their very presence, and even though that hostility mellowed once it became obvious that women were making a positive contribution, they still had to develop a particular sense of humour if they were to survive. It cannot have been easy.
During the war I worked with Group 2 London Civil Defence. There was a former ATS who had been discharged on account of her pregnancy, who became our housekeeper. After the birth of her daughter, Victoria, she returned to our employ. I thought this rather an odd choice of name and asked her: ‘Named after the queen?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘after the station!’
Leila Mackinlay, London
During the war both my twin sister and myself served in the Women’s Timber Corps, a branch of the Land Army. We joined, aged eighteen, and stayed in that service until we were twenty-two. During our annual leave we were allowed a travel warrant to the furthest point of England – any travel beyond that point, to Scotland or Wales, and we had to pay our own way.
My sister and myself, and two other friends all stationed in Hereford, decided to use our travel warrants to go to Carlisle and, from there to hitchhike around Scotland as we couldn’t afford digs and fares. At Oban we couldn’t find a Toc H or a hostel, and couldn’t afford the price of a bed and breakfast, so tried to stow away on a boat for the night. Unfortunately, we got caught and were taken by the quartermaster to the local police station. Since the police couldn’t help us find cheap lodgings, we begged to be put in a police cell for the night. Eventually we managed to persuade the police that we preferred to be locked up to spending the night outdoors with no shelter.
By law, before being given a bed for the night, we had to have our particulars recorded – our descriptions such as hair colouring and so on. We were shown to our cell and were literally locked in. We couldn’t sleep and, at 4.30 a.m., wanted to get out so much that we began banging on the door and shouting. It took a while, but since we weren’t criminals, we were eventually allowed to leave.
A while later, I sent a parcel of Herefordshire apples to the policeman who had taken care of us. He replied, assuring us that the apples were delicious and that we had been ‘lovely’ prisoners, who were ‘a joy to lock up’.
Ann Kent, Sandbach
During the war years I was working with the Land Army. There were a lot of Englishmen, but also Italian prisoners of war. The weather in one particular summer was wet and there was a lot of spreading of lime to be done. These prisoners’ English vocabulary was very limited but the local boys were intent on teaching them their swear words.
One particular day, Renado, who always called me ‘Siliva’, came back while I was milking and called to me: ‘Siliva, lime no bloody good, similar shit!’ Loosely translated, he meant that the rain had made the lime so sticky that it was comparable with cow manure. Surrounded as I was by other workers, I was so embarrassed.
Sylvia Chaplin, Truro
My sister was a nursing sister in a hospital in Liverpool. One day a woman arrived at the hospital’s maternity ward. Upon admission, she was asked for the name of her husband. She told the staff that her husband had been a prisoner of war in Germany for the past two years. When she was asked how she came to be expecting a baby if this was the case, she replied: ‘Oh, but he’s written, you see!’
E
velyn Whalley, Southport
As a student nurse, I was based on a maternity ward when an unmarried middle-aged lady was admitted to have her baby. She was accompanied by her mother, a traditional type who kept crying and saying: ‘It was them there soldiers, they’ve been manoeuvring around our village again!’
ANONYMOUS, IPSWICH
The best war cartoon of my recollection had to do with the policy of removing UXBs to distant open spaces for defusing. There was the man seated on the upper deck of a bus with a huge bomb on the seat beside him. The conductress approaches and he asks for ‘One and a half to Hackney Marshes.’
Leila Mackinlay, London
Working with the Land Army, it was one of my jobs to wash the cows’ udders, prior to the attachment of the automatic milkers. One of the other girls was an inveterate telltale, although nobody took much notice of her. I’d just finished my washing one day when the cowman came in.
‘She’s missed that one!’ the triumphant telltale exclaimed.
‘She’d have a job with that one,’ the cowman replied, ‘it’s a young bull!’
Miss P. Manser, Maidstone
About 1942, our Scottish GCO decided he would organize a Christmas party. Situated, as we were, at the then North-Western Polytechnic in Kentish Town, we had the correct facilities. It was decided that everyone should try to dress up a bit and the girls all managed some sort of party dress. Inevitably there were Scottish reels and the WVC lady, small but with an ample bust, had on a tight evening skirt and low-necked blouse. I can still see the fascinated eyes of the men, happily anticipating the worst. I hasten to say this never happened, but it looked a near thing.